Thursday, December 27, 2012

Christmas!!!

We slept in on Christmas morning and woke to find that Santa had eaten his cookies, drank his milk and left a letter with a couple of gifts!

Each of the kids got a plate and silverware and they were really, really excited.

Daddy reading the letter from Santa.

And reading the Christmas Story from the Bible.

Aaron playing with the most cooperative cat ever!

Abby ready for the airport

When we left the house, our flight was on time and I checked it pretty often on the way to the airport. About 20 minutes out, the status showed a 45 minute delay. When we got to the airport we found out that it was because our plane was coming from Chicago and had been delayed because of weather, but it was in the air and the updated time should be good. The only trouble was that the delay pushed us into the time that Dallas was supposed to be getting ice. My husband assured me that the airlines wouldn't let us take off if they weren't sure we could land.

We used our extra time to eat at Max and Erma's. I'm glad we did.

I love this picture of Aaron taking the big suitcase into the airport. He's such a big boy!

Our flight did take off about 45 minutes after it was supposed to (really about 15 minutes after that). When it was time to land, though, the conditions weren't good at DFW and the airline wanted to divert us to Austin. Our pilot chose to land at DFW but could not get to a gate. He told us that the airline would not keep us on the runway more than three hours because it would be charged a fee of approximately $3 million by the FAA. So, at some point in the next three hours we would have a gate.

The pilot updated us as often as he could, but really didn't have any information. American was telling him that we had to go to our assigned gate where there was a parked airplane with no pilot. Since we could not find a pilot to move that plane we were stuck. Until we came up on the three hour mark. At that point, American allowed our pilot to taxi around the airport to an open gate in another terminal. At 9:49pm, we exited the plane that was supposed to have landed at 5:40. And we exited to utter chaos. DFW was a nightmare of people with cancelled flights and missed connections. Our car was completely iced. We finally left the airport at 10:52 at which point both of our exhausted kids fell asleep in the car. They didn't wake when we carried them through the snow into the house.

I will say that our kids were really quite angelic throughout the ordeal (until the very end when we had to taxi around the airport which is the size of a small county and Abby had to be constrained in a seat. that part did not go well, but other than that...) and the fellow passengers were so kind. Everyone was lovely and the staff did everything they could to keep people comfortable. They had free drinks and snacks until they ran out and everyone was very friendly.

And that was our Very Merry Christmas! I hope yours was fabulous, as well.